The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
Reliably communicating information in a network is important. Service providers and enterprise customers may require deploying network redundancy. One of the network redundancy solutions consists of deploying a cluster at the edge of the network, so that provider edge system has redundant connections to customer edge network. In a cluster system, multiple independent packet switching systems operate as a single logical packet switching system.